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For at least the past two decades, questions concerning the nature, value and parameters of religious pluralism have been the focus of intense debate within Europe. From controversies regarding the permissibility of religious clothing and symbols in the public sphere, to those related to limits on religious speech and speech that may offend religious sensibilities, and to those concerning the accommodation of religious practices, much of this questioning has concerned issues related to the migration of Muslims to Europe. For many, on both the right and the left, these controversies reveal a failure of religious pluralism in the face of a culture portrayed as inassimilable and incompatible with secular, democratic society. In this way, the crisis of religious pluralism appears to be rooted in an incommensurability of Islam and European society. Consequently, solutions to the crisis must be found in measures responding to the presence, and governing the practices of Muslim subjects. Below, I will discuss the purported crisis of religious pluralism in Europe and argue that while it is often depicted as a result of the particularities of Islamic culture and theology, recent controversies point to a deeper crisis born of an historical failure to resolve the question of the governance of religious subjects.
Islam and the Crisis of Religious Pluralism
Since the early 1990s, the notion that Europe is in the midst of a crisis has been a growing refrain. This has been articulated as a crisis of a secular-democratic European society and the values that it is said to both promote and reflect. As I have written about extensively elsewhere, this crisis has arisen from and relates to Europe's encounter with two immanent others - the Muslim migrant and the Turkish state - both portrayed as representatives of the (actual or potential) destabilizing and corrosive religious otherness of Islam.1 It is only within a context of immanence - the presence of Muslim migrants in the "diaspora zone"2 of Europe - or potential immanence (future Muslim migration to Europe or Turkish accession to the European Union) that particular features of Islamic culture, society and subjectivity, long-identified as troubling within Orientalist scholarship, came to be seen as an issue for the governance of European states.
Within this discourse of a crisis of religious pluralism, the foremost concern is an ostensible incommensurability of Islam and secular, democratic society. This concern is articulated in two related ways. The first identifies elements of Islamic theology that are said to be directly incompatible with secular society. Primary among these is an understanding of Islam as an all-embracing religious system for which, as Charles Taylor asserts, "there is no question of separating politics and religion the way we have come to expect in Western liberal society."3 Islam, therefore, appears as a system lacking the separation of civil and religious spheres fundamental to a secular society. The second points to a variety of social and political problems found in regions with majority Muslim populations and attributes these to Islam. Of these problems, the most routinely mentioned are those related to: a) patriarchal gender relations, such as gender segregation, sexual violence, honor killings and female genital mutilation; b) the mistreatment of religious and sexual minorities - pointing to discrimination, violence and the lack of legal rights and protections for these groups; c) a lack of respect for freedom of expression - as epitomized by the protests and violent reactions to the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper in 2005, and the release of films critical of Islam, such as The Innocence of Muslims in 2012 and the 2004 film Submission, whose director, Theo Van Gogh, was later murdered; and d) a lack of democracy in the Muslim world, both historically and in the contemporary times. These events, practices and interpretations of theology are said to be demonstrative of the essential incommensurability of Islam and secular democracy and, consequently, of the incompatibility of Muslims with European society.